Change user of transmission-daemon under Debian and Raspbian

I have a raspi3 running transmission daemon downloading to an external USB drive shared via Samba. I don’t want to keep using debian-transmission user with the daemon since just switching to my user account having the access rights to the external USB is much simpler.

I had it already nice and running before, but updating the daemon with apt-get messed everything (and lost all the running torrents as well) so I had to rediscover the procedure once again, and for posterity (and myself for future occasions) I’m writing it down here.

By the way all the missing torrents appeared again after I solved the issue.

So, here are the things you need to do:

run sudo service transmission-daemon stop just in case

edit /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon to have USER=username

edit /lib/systemd/system/transmission-daemon.service to the same effect